Humanist and scholar, b. 27 October 1469 (Rotterdam, Holland), d. 12 July 1536 (Basel, Switzerland).
Desiderius Erasmus was the second (illegitimate) son of a priest and the daughter of a physician. Both parents died when the two children were still young, and Erasmus and his brother were sent to a Christian lay school that educated for entry into monasteries. Both became monks, Desiderius joining the Augustinian order in 1485.
Erasmus was ordained into priesthood in 1492 but left the monastery to become Latin secretary to the bishop of Cambray. He had developed a deep dislike of formal piety and artificial theological arguments; he wanted to return to an independent study of the classical sources and declared: "All sound learning is secular learning." But the bishop, who had noticed Erasmus' aversion towards the lavish lifestyle at the bishop's court residence, sent him to the university of Paris for further studies.
At the university Erasmus took pupils to finance his own classical studies and began writing study notes on Latin sources that would soon develop into standard texts. By 1502 he was reading the works of the 3rd century Greek writer Origen and of other early Christian philosophers and concluded that "monasticism is not piety."
A trip to England opened the opportunity to travel to Italy as the tutor of the sons of the physician to the future king Henry VIII. In Venice he published the Adagia, an enlarged version of a text written in 1500 in Paris. It contained over 3,000 entries of Greek and Latin proverbs and sayings and made his name famous around Europe.
Erasmus returned to England in 1509. For the next five years he lectured in Cambridge. In 1514 he travelled to Basel (Switzerland) to oversee the publication of an enlarged and revised edition of his Adagia, which he developed into a criticism of church practices: popes who went to war, imitating Caesar rather then Christ; potentates who provoked war for reasons of vanity; priests who praised their actions and kept control of the masses through superstition.
The next years were spent in Brabant at the court of the Netherlands, were Erasmus was named honorary councillor to the future king Charles V. In his writings he promoted a new theological education based on the study of languages and the classical sources. As a member of the theological faculty of nearby Louvain he supported the establishment of the Trilingual College with chairs in Latin, Greek and Hebrew and published an annotated Greek edition of the New Testament.
At the same time a more radical theological challenge developed in Germany, where Luther questioned the authority of the pope and preached that salvation does not require priestly absolution but can be achieved through faith alone. Erasmus developed an extensive correspondence with Luther.
Although he found many good arguments in Luther's writings and spoke of him in a letter to pope Leo X as "a mighty trumpet of Gospel truth", he made it clear that Luther's ideas were not his, as was often claimed. He rejected the notion of salvation through faith, preferring instead the notion of free choice, and hoped that reform of the Catholic church combined with better education could salvage Christian unity. He wrote to the pope to suggest changes, such as permission for priests to marry. In 1521, when it appeared that the court might request him to write a book against Luther, he left Brabant for Basel, where he instructed his printer not to print works by Luther to avoid confusion of his and Luther's positions.
Although Erasmus was one of the most powerful forces in the movement to adapt Christianity to the social and political developments of the time, he did not engage himself in the battle but remained the intellectual and scholar, who comments on the developments and hopes for compromise: In the chapter Inquisitio de fide ("Investigation about Faith") of his Colloquia, written in Basel during 1522 - 1533, a Catholic is surprised to find that the Lutherans accept all dogmas of the Christian faith.
Erasmus stayed with the Catholic church but had to defend himself against attacks from both sides. Some of his later writings developed into apologetical polemics. When Basel banned Catholicism Erasmus went to Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany). He returned to Basel to oversee the publication of his manual on preaching Ecclesiastes and died in that city.
Erasmus, the greatest scholar of the European civilization during the 16th century, has had an enormous impact on future European thinkers. His unshakeable belief in the value of education helped him lay the foundation of what was to become known as humanist education, the study of the Greek and Latin classics and the historical-critical study of the past. His works, written as study aids, came into use in humanist schools all over Europe. The Catholic church placed many passages from his works on its list of forbidden texts (index expurgatorius) in 1571.